“I was just a bossy person for 50 years,” Fiona Campbell joked during a lunch held in her honour, AXA Millésimes managing director Christian Sealy, in London on Friday.
Held at Noizé, the event saw the UK's top wine writers gather in secret to celebrate Fiona Campbell's long and impressive career in PR, which has seen her work with a wide range of clients, from high-end clients – such as Champagne Krug – to general clients. , with wines from Spain, as well as retailers, notably Majestic.
However, its oldest client was Sealy, who hired Campbell when he took over as CEO of Quinta do Noval, the precious ports producer, owned by AXA Millésimes.
It was in 1994 that Campbell pitched for the account alongside a host of other PR agencies, all of whom were tasked with marketing Noval's “renaissance”, under Seeley's management.
Seeley, who recalled this meeting with Campbell, said she came armed without any presentation and told him exactly what to do, then said she could do it for him.
As Seeley previously told db, “I chose her, without hesitation, from a select group of PR agencies who came to pitch, and I have never regretted it.”
Commenting that she was “wonderful to work with”, he thanked her, before celebrating her retirement, which coincided with her 81st birthday, by serving Nouvel's most sought-after Port – Nacional – and since the year the couple began their working relationship: 1994.
Among the other ports served at the celebration lunch, which brought together key members of the UK wine press, including Jancis Robinson MW OBE and Victoria Moore, were the 2003 Nouval and then the 2017 Nacional.
Having hosted press trips to Nouval for almost every wine of the past 30 years, Campbell comments on the stunning array of ports, saying “I've had my foot in all of these things.”
As you can read about in former Database editor Gabriel Stone's comprehensive interview with Campbell earlier this year, Campbell's career in wine marketing can be traced back to Peter Haslacher, whose family wine brand Deinhard was a client during her days as director For the store based in Bristol. The southwest section of the Royds advertising set in the late 1970s.
In the run-up to the Bristol Wine Fair, Campbell used her fashion PR to ensure that Denhard appeared in shop windows across the city, writes Gabriel Stone. “No one was doing anything like this,” she recalls. Clearly impressed, Haslacher persuaded this woman who had little knowledge of wine to handle public relations for not only his own brand, but also for brands he imported, which included Taylor Port.
It was working with that last brand that instilled in her her great love for its port and source region, the Douro.
At the end of Friday's brunch, at which guests also drank great wines from some of the other AXA Millésimes-owned estates – such as Suduiraut and Pichon-Baron (pictured below) – Campbell urged the press to give her protégé, Madeleine Waters of The Co, “all the support Which you can”, with Waters acquiring the AXA brands after being handed over a year by Campbell.
Read more
The Big Interview: Fiona Campbell
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